Wavelength agile switching in photonic integrated circuits

In the last decade, photonic integration has been considered as a suitable candidate to provide scalable, monolithically integrated solution to accomplish wavelength agile switching circuits for future bandwidth demands. Though many prototypes have been proposed before, none of them have demonstrated the system level complexity that is required of them. This thesis focuses on two approaches, namely wavelength selective switches (WSS) and resonant tunable switches, for achieving wavelength agile networking. The thesis aims at reducing the existing substantial gap between the system-level requirements and the demonstrated circuit-level competence. Wavelength agile switching elements are the essential building blocks for an integrated wavelength agile networking. A compact, scalable reconfigurable WSS design using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) gated cyclic arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is proposed. The circuit is realized on an active-passive re-grown InP wafer. A first experimental demonstration to increase end-to-end capacity by using waveband multiplexing for multi-wavelength routing is shown. Power penalties less than 1.0 dB is measured. Time and wavelength multiplexed data is routed dynamically for guard times as low as 2 ns. For the first time, a dynamic label-controlled remote reconfiguration is demonstrated using an on-chip optical label detection scheme and signal gating using the same SOA array. This enables on-the-fly reconfiguration without external read-out circuitry.